The Origins of Totalitarianism, Part 3: Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt
Language: English
Pages: 313
ISBN: 2:00209558
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Origins of Totalitarianism begins with the rise of anti-Semitism in central and western Europe in the 1800s and continues with an examination of European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of World War I. Arendt explores the institutions and operations of totalitarian movements, focusing on the two genuine forms of totalitarian government in our time—Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia—which she adroitly recognizes were two sides of the same coin, rather than opposing philosophies of Right and Left. From this vantage point, she discusses the evolution of classes into masses, the role of propaganda in dealing with the nontotalitarian world, the use of terror, and the nature of isolation and loneliness as preconditions for total domination.
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and in the commanding staffs of the armed forces from 16 to 24. The same happened in all other institutions which Stalin described as the ‘transmission belts’ connecting the party with the people.” [back] *** 26 Arthur Rosenberg, op. cit., loc. cit. [back] *** 27 Maunz, op. cit., p. 12. [back] *** 28 The jurist and Obersturmbannfuehrer, Professor R. Hoehn, has expressed this in the following words: “And there was still another thing which foreigners, but Germans, too, had to get used to:
what they intend to do with it is characteristic of all mob leaders, but does not come up to the standards of totalitarianism. The true goal of Fascism was only to seize power and establish the Fascist “elite” as uncontested ruler over the country. Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of
psychology. The psychology of the double agent, who was willing to pay the price of a short life for the exalted existence of a few years at the peak, has necessarily become the philosophy in personal matters of the whole post-revolutionary generation in Russia, and to a lesser but still very dangerous extent, in postwar Germany. This is the society, permeated by standards and living by methods which once had been the monopoly of the secret police, in which the totalitarian secret police
imagination of those who have been aroused by such reports but have not actually been smitten in their own flesh, of those who are consequently free from the bestial, desperate terror which, when confronted by real, present horror, inexorably paralyzes everything that is not mere reaction, can afford to keep thinking about horrors. Such thoughts are useful only for the perception of political contexts and the mobilization of political passions. A change of personality of any sort whatever can no
Khrushchev’s speech at the Twentieth Party Congress—as well as new information on the Stalin regime from recent publications. Moreover, there were certain insights of a strictly theoretical nature, closely connected with my analysis of the elements of total domination, which I did not possess when I finished the original manuscript that ended with rather inconclusive “Concluding Remarks.” The last chapter of this edition, “Ideology and Terror,” replaced these “Remarks,” which, to the extent that
